Posted December 8th, 2009 by Tim Mollison
Investigation by the Tri-Cities Transport Action Group (TriTAG) reveals that the planned 2010 budget for the Region of Waterloo is heavily skewed towards road expansion and makes minimal investments in transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure.
“While the Region is budgeting $100 million for road infrastructure in 2010, little of that money is for sidewalks and bicycle lanes — and most of that expenditure is almost incidental”, said Tim Mollison, a TriTAG founding member. “Major Regional roads such as Franklin Boulevard, Ottawa Street, Fischer-Hallman Road, Coronation Boulevard, Westmount Road, King Street, and Hespeler Road are all still missing sidewalks. Of the Region’s proposed $100 million transportation budget, less than $1 million is planned for sidewalks, and out of a total expenditure of $2.2 million for sidewalks and bike lanes, only $300,000 is not part of an existing road project.”
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In Buses, Cycling, Light Rail, News, Transit, TriTAG, Walking | 2 Comments »
Posted December 6th, 2009 by Michael Druker
In a 1999 paper, Weyrich and Lind argue that judging transit in North America by overall transit modal share is misleading, as most of the urban population is either not served by transit or served poorly. They suggest it is more appropriate to consider transit usage on transit-competitive trips. In light of this, I decided to investigate the modal split between transit and private vehicles on a transit-competitive corridor in the Region of Waterloo.
The proportion of overall trips in the Region of Waterloo taken on transit is perhaps 4%. But what about corridors with frequent transit?
There is really only one such corridor in the entire region – King Street in Kitchener-Waterloo. Between the Charles Street Terminal in Kitchener and University Avenue in Waterloo, Route 7 buses can be counted on to appear every 8 minutes or better from morning to evening. In addition to the 7, the iXpress route also runs along the same corridor, with 15 minute service. No other corridor has service better than every 12-15 minutes.
So on the morning of Monday, November 23, I set up on King Street right at the Kitchener-Waterloo border (between Union and Mt. Hope streets) with a clipboard and a video camera, and recorded trips between 7:30 and 8:30 am. It was overcast and foggy, with temperature between 1°C and 4°C. At the time I recorded all non-motor-vehicle trips, and the number of people on each Grand River Transit bus. GRT buses have 35-40 seats, but people rarely use all seats, so a bus with some standees can be expected to have around 35 people. Crush load is around 70-80 people. I used these figures to estimate the number of people on each bus as a multiple of five.
I counted other vehicles afterward on video, with one category for private vehicles (motorcycles, cars, and light trucks that weren’t obviously commercial) and one for all other vehicles. These included work vans, taxis, delivery trucks, transport trucks, dump trucks, and non-GRT buses, with a few one-offs.
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In Buses, Transit | No Comments »
Posted November 26th, 2009 by Sylvan Mably
At last night’s Regional budget committee public input meeting, TriTAG spoke in support of more funding for transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure. The 2010 Regional transportation budget includes $71 million set aside for growth-related road expansion, but only $2.1 million for improved sidewalks and bike lanes. The entirety of the Federal Gas Tax Fund, intended to be used for environmentally sustainable municipal infrastructure projects, will be spent on roads. If even half of the Federal Gas Tax Fund were diverted from road spending, the budget for sidewalks and bike lanes could be increased threefold. TriTAG also advocated for transit funding to alleviate the overcrowding crisis on many routes.
The full text of TriTAG’s speech is included below.
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In Buses, Cycling, News, Transit, TriTAG, Walking | No Comments »
Posted October 26th, 2009 by Tim Mollison
With the arrival of colder weather, GRT is seeing a huge spike in ridership and some customers are being left behind as they are passed by full-to-capacity buses. However, without more money from Regional Council now, GRT can’t hire more drivers to put buses on the road or mechanics to keep them there. Write your Regional Councillor and ask for them to provide an emergency increase to the transit budget. The current state of underfunding is not good for the growth of public transit — one morning left out in the cold may well drive those new-to-transit right back to their private vehicles.
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